HOTELS FOR THE POOR.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVI, Issue XXII, 30 May 1896, Page 638

HOTELS FOR THE POOR.

An American gentleman named Mr Mills is about to combine philanthropy and business in a way that must do great good to the poor of New York city. By an outlay of more than £160,000 he will build and equip, in tbe metropolitan slums, two large hotels, at which the independent poor may obtain lodgings at no greater cost than that which gets them precarious shelter in common tenements. These hotels will be elean, airy, wholesome, fire-proof, well lighted and carefully managed. One of them is to have a capacity of 1,500 guests. He estimates that at the low- scale of rental fixed upon, the returns will be certain to cover a fair interest on the investment.

The thoughtful public will hope that this forecast may prove correct, not merely on Mr Mills’ account, bnt because the financial success of his venture would be likely to lead other rich men to go and do likewise. New York and other great cities has urgent need of not only two, but a hundred such hotels. The reasons why are many.

In the first place the Mills plan is designed to segregate crime from misery. In the common tenement tbe worthy poor and the vicious or degraded class are herded together and the one element becomes the prey of the other. The children of both grow up in company and those who, under other and better conditions, might come to be good citizens, take the hue of their surroundings and go to the bad. The tenement gathers all who enter it into a common cesspool. It is the spawning place, as well as the haunt of wickedness and crime, but a hotel like that which Mr Mills proposes to build would be the abode of the decent and industrious poor who would there have the chance to rear their families in a civilised way. That is as impossible now, in the streets back of the Bowery, as it would be among the Dervishes of the Soudan.

The second point is that the new undertaking promises to make relief work easy. It is a difficult, an inoffensive, and an unsafe thing to seek out the needy in the lairs which they are forced to share with thieves and desperadoes. Few charitable

people who begin the work follow it np. As a result the respectable poor suffer for aid which they would be sure to receive if they were decently housed and in honest fellowship. Again, there is the matter of epidemics. The traditional Five Points lodging-house is a breeder of disease. Noisome dens with little air or light and with no sanitary features are the natural homes of fever and smallpox germs. It is among them that contagious diseases first appear and from them that they spread. Hotels on the Mills’ plan, by eliminating squalor and dirt and letting in fresh air and sunshine, by giving the poor all sanitary appliances which the dictates of good health impose, and guarding families from the dangers due to overcrowding, would be an effective ally

of the New, York Board of Health in its attempts to ward off contagious maladies. It follows from the above that, with the increase of great hotels for the submerged classes, the average death rate of the city would be cut down. This would be equally true of mortality from disease, from violence and from fire.

There is another plea in the argument for these hotels which ought to appeal strongly to the rich men of New York, who might easily further the general plan of their fellow-millionaire and put hotels for the poor in every part of the town where they would find support. It is that, housed and herded as they now are, the under classes may at any time become a deadly menace to the upper classes, whom they surround like a besieging army. A map of Manhattan

island shows that its wealth is stored along a narrow strip of soil, running lengthwise, midway between the No-th and East rivers, from the Battery to the Harlem river. On either side of this causeway of opulence presses the vast, hungry, sullen horde of the poor. An impetuous rush and their lines would meet atove the ruins of all that lay between. It is well to let such people know that the rich are not all sordid and unkind, but that they are willing to aid them to live as human beings should and make the best of their slender opportunities for good. In a word, Mr Mills has pointed a way for his class which it will be to the advantage of the rich and poor alike for it to follow.